Kate Hudson relieved not to worry about looks

Kate Hudson enjoyed not having to worry about her appearance for 'A Little Bit of Heaven'.

The actress plays a woman dying of cancer in the film, which she admitted was a huge challenge, but meant she didn't have to worry about her looks or spend hours in a make-up trailer each day.

She said: "It was nice not to have to wake up and worry about bags under my eyes! Usually when you walk into a make-up trailer your make-up artist puts ice under your eyes, but in this film, we just threw all that stuff away.

"There was not a stitch of make-up on my face. It's fun when you haven't had it done in a while, but when you're working on a movie, it's just a lot of people poking at you."

The 31-year-old actress - who has a seven-year-old son Ryder from her marriage to Chris Robinson and is currently expecting her first child with boyfriend Matt Bellamy - also said she had to change her appearance during filming to reflect her character's battle with cancer, but not in the way most people would expect.

She explained: "The one thing that I found really interesting was the process of what kind of treatment she would have had, and what her body frame would have looked like if she went through it.

"A lot of times people associate sickness with frailty and getting real skinny, and, in this situation we had to work with her not being too skinny but actually getting bloated, which was odd. I had to eat salty things on certain days."